Rather than have us explain what he's going to be doing at the festival, Martin Wilson spells it out in his own words...

There have got to be easier ways to get a free ticket! Last year the art committee asked me to come back and create a piece on site during this year's festival. I'm beginning to wish I'd just said no, but I was intrigued by the challenge, so foolishly I agreed.

If you know my work, you'll appreciate something of the challenge I am putting myself in for. Usually my pictures take months in the gestation of the idea, months in the planning and then more months in the execution. Greenbelt only lasts 4 days! I know a temple was once torn down and rebuilt in 3 days, but that takes a very special kind of person. I'm going to have my work cut out.

Right now my biggest challenge has been distilling my ideas. Normally my work is a response to my environment; I try to find ways to transform the everyday into something unexpected, to take the ordinary and get people to look at it in a new way. But Greenbelt isn't everyday, it isn't ordinary. It's a tiny world of its own, so that's thrown me a bit!

I've been struggling to find some way to capture something of the peculiar nature of Greenbelt that will still have relevance off-site in the real world. Despite the fact that there are only a few months before I have to commit to film, my ideas are still (excuse the pun) a bit underdeveloped.

I'm trying to untangle a number of threads, hoping that one of them will lead me out of the labyrinth, and the strongest thread at the moment seems to be spun from nylon and canvas cotton. One thing Greenbelt has plenty of is tents, and to me tents seem to suggest a number of interesting ideas.

Hopefully your tent at Greenbelt will do a fair job at protecting you from whatever sun, rain and wind we are due for, but tents are essentially temporary shelters, rarely would you call them home. It feels much more like home when you live in a house. And you know you've really arrived when you're living it up in a grand mansion!

Are we a bit like the children of Israel, wandering in the desert for years living in tents, before we finally come home to the promised land?

Paul in Corinthians uses a picture of an earthly tent and an eternal house to mirror the difference between the physical and the spiritual world. In the mirror's reflection things are strangely flipped; The physical world which we perceive as solid and concrete is actually flimsy and fragile, in is actually the spiritual realm that has more substance. And the fragility of this physical world is always worth remembering, if we burn fires inside our tent to keep us warm for the moment, we're going to be in trouble in the long now.

So tents are my theme. If you see a strange man (with unnecessarily large sideburns) trying to take interesting pictures of awnings and guy ropes, don't worry, it's only me. Just be thankful that you were wise enough to buy your ticket!